Eater spoke with chef-owner Joe Cassinelli of Posto and The Painted Burro in Davis Square about some numbers associated with making pizza at Posto, his pizzeria. Here's what he had to say.
How many pizzas do you sell a day? I probably sell about a hundred and fifty pizzas on a weekday, and about two hundred, two plus on Friday or Saturday.
How much flour do you use? We use anywhere from 110 to 160 kilos a day.
And sauce? Well we don't use as much sauce, it's probably four gallons a day.
How hot are the ovens? Well it's three different temperatures. There's ambient heat, radiant heat, and there's a convection heat. The pizza needs all of those temperatures to kind of work. The dome of the oven with the flame roaring will be somewhere between 950 and 1000 degrees. The floor of the oven will be around 700 to 750 degrees, and the overall, ambient temperature is about 850
How much cheese do you use? We make 50 pounds of cheese every day, fresh mozzarella.
Why do you make your own cheese? Because our oven burns at such a high temperature, we needed to make our own mozzarella that was creamy but dry, in a way. By hand-stretching the mozzarella we get it to the right consistency that we need. Other cheaper cheeses will actually break in the oven, meaning the cheese will separate on the pizza. It will be all watery, or you'll get a cheese that will just brown, turn a crusty, golden color. We need to make a cheese that has the right amount of moisture and the right amount of fat, because the pizzas only cook for about sixty to ninety seconds.
So do you move the pies around? Yeah, I've actually got a video on my Facebook. Judging from where the wood-burning fire is, you definitely have to rotate the pizza a few times in there, because it cooks so quickly. So the pizza handler needs to be very skilled at judging time, temperature, distance from the flame, all these kinds of things. We refer to it as the dance, all night long. You have to learn to dance with the oven, dance with the pizza, all night.
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